Who are the Aryans (not)?

Who were the Aryans?

Aryan or Arya is a term originally used as an ethnocultural self-designation by Indo-Iranians in ancient times, in contrast to the nearby outsiders known as ‘non-Aryan’.

In the 1850s the term ‘Aryan’ was adopted as a racial category by French writer Arthur de Gobineau, who, through the later works of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, influenced the Nazi racial ideology. Under Nazi rule (1933–1945), the term applied to most inhabitants of Germany excluding Jews and Slavs such as Czechs, Poles or Russians. Those classified as ‘non-Aryans,’ especially Jews, were discriminated against before suffering the systematic mass killing known as the Holocaust. The atrocities committed in the name of Aryanist supremacist ideologies have led academics to generally avoid the term ‘Aryan’, which has been replaced in most cases by ‘Indo-Iranian’, although the South Asian branch is still known as ‘Indo-Aryan’.

Studies also point to the strong presence of Yamnaya descent in the current nations of South Asia, especially in groups that are referred to as Indo-Aryans. According to Pathak et al. (2018), the “North-Western Indian & Pakistani” populations (PNWI) showed significant Middle-Late Bronze Age Steppe (Steppe_MLBA) ancestry along with Yamnaya Early-Middle Bronze Age (Steppe_EMBA) ancestry, but the Indo-Europeans of Gangetic Plains and Dravidian people only showed significant Yamnaya (Steppe_EMBA) ancestry and no Steppe_MLBA. The study also noted that ancient south Asian samples had significantly higher Steppe_MLBA than Steppe_EMBA (or Yamnaya). The study identified the Rors as the population in South Asia with the highest proportion of Steppe ancestry. Lazaridis et al. (2016) estimated (6.5–50.2 %) steppe-related admixture in South Asians, though the proportion of Steppe ancestry varies widely across ethnic groups. According to Narasimhan et al. (2019), the Yamnaya-related ancestry, termed Western_Steppe_EMBA, that reached central and south Asia was not the initial expansion from the steppe to the east, but a secondary expansion that involved a group possessing ~67% Western_Steppe_EMBA ancestry and ~33% ancestry from the European cline. This group included people similar to that of Corded Ware, Srubnaya, Petrovka, and Sintashta. Moving further east in the central steppe, it acquired ~9% ancestry from a group of people that possessed West Siberian Hunter Gatherer ancestry, thus forming the Central Steppe MLBA cluster, which is the primary source of steppe ancestry in South Asia, contributing up to 30% of the ancestry of the modern groups in the region.

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